Be Spectacled
by Haruka Minamino
Summary: Darcy Lewis in kindergarten was a shy, tiny girl with chubby cheeks. She loved reading. A lot. It was the only time, the only place, where she felt safe. There were magic carpet rides, castles in the skies, and men wearing red, white and blue who made sure every man, woman and child in America was safe and sound.


Darcy Lewis in kindergarten was a shy, tiny girl with chubby cheeks. She loved reading. A lot. It was the only time, the only place, where she felt safe. The pages had magic carpet rides, castles in the skies, and men wearing red, white and blue who made sure every man, woman and child in America was safe and sound. In fact, in between reading **Sleeping Beauty** and** A Little Princess**, she loved reading most about** Captain America**, with his golden hair and bright blue eyes and wide, happy smile. She had her Grandpa Tim to thank for the collection.

Because in school, she got beat up a lot, by big girls who hated how she always knew the answer to every question and thought she was sucking up to the teachers (though to be fair she did also make a lucky guess every now and then), and even bigger boys who thought they could get away in making any kid cry just because.

Some of the grown-ups said that pulling her pigtails, flipping her skirts, ruining her artwork and stealing her stuff was the way the boys at the playground showed that they had a crush on her. But she knew better, because they all read the** Captain America** comics too, and yet they didn't act anywhere as polite, as friendly or as generous as the good Captain.

And honestly? At home it wasn't much better either. While her parents praised her for doing well at school, all gold stars and high grades, her sister would always call her "nerd" or "dweeb" while pinching her cheeks in every which way. (At the ripe old age of twelve, her sister would have been on the top five of class at the private school they put her through, but she was at detention a lot for writing on school property outside of sheets of paper, for coming to class with technicolor hair, and for flicking gum at teachers she didn't like.) Their brother, who was even older at 14, didn't really mind her much to begin with.

So Darcy lost herself in her books and her comics, reading until very late at night — sometimes with a lamp to guide her, but on clear nights just the moon in the sky. The stories of a stick-thin boy who stood up to bullies and became a superhero by some top-secret, large-scale science project became her source of comfort when it took all her energy to get dressed in her hand-me-down jumpers and mary-janes.

It was only a matter of time before she started blinking blearily at the page she was reading, and squinting at it. And then when she did these she sometimes got headaches as well.

She was soon diagnosed with myopia, or near-sightedness, with bonus astigmatism to boot. She was disappointed — couldn't she have gotten a magical super serum to make her see better instead? Not to mention that these glasses given by her father's ears-eyes-nose-throat doctor were literally spectacles in and of themselves: large round black frames with thick lenses, graded -2.50 at the right and -4.00 at the left.

And sure enough, she was in for it at school. The reading class girls called her "four-eyes" and "owl." Some of her classmates still hid her lunchbox; today it was inside the sandbox. But the last straw was when one of the prep-school boys, who she thought was already supposed to have been moved to first grade, decided to toss her off the swing.

She felt the tears prickle in her eyes as she tried to get up and scrabble for her glasses. But once she found them, she tossed her head up, eyes blazing, and marched up to the round bear-like boy. What was his name, Paul? Raymond? Joe? It didn't really matter, because she punched him straight in the face and sent him falling to the ground.

As she sat in the time-out corner, scratching the still-bloody scabs at her knees while trying to set her now-crooked glasses on her nose, all she could think about was how, maybe, Captain America would've been proud.


End file.
